Trump policy still checks fingerprints of migrant child...

1of10A potable water truck is seen among tents inside the Tornillo detention camp for migrant teens in Tornillo on Dec. 13. The facility is expected to close in mid-January.Photo: Andres Leighton, FRE / Associated Press

2of10U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, second from left, speaks with four other Democratic members of Congress after touring the Tornillo international port of entry where several thousand immigrant teens are being housed Dec. 15. With him are from left, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-HI, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon and Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif.Photo: Rudy Gutierrez, MBR / Associated Press

4of10Aerial view of the tent city at the Marcelino Serna Port of Entry, Wednesday, September 12, 2018, in Tornillo. The shelter opened in June and has grown approximately 10 times in size, compared to file photos. Photo by Ivan Pierre AguirrePhoto: Ivan Pierre Aguirre, Freelance Photographer / Ivan Pierre Aguirre

5of10Immigrant boys stand in line at tent city at the Marcelino Serna Port of Entry, Wednesday, September 12, 2018, in Tornillo. The shelter opened in June and has grown approximately 10 times in size, compared to file photos. Photo by Ivan Pierre AguirrePhoto: Ivan Pierre Aguirre, Freelance Photographer / Ivan Pierre Aguirre

6of10Aerial view of the tent city at the Marcelino Serna Port of Entry, Wednesday, September 12, 2018, in Tornillo. The shelter opened in June and has grown approximately 10 times in size, compared to file photos. Photo by Ivan Pierre AguirrePhoto: Ivan Pierre Aguirre, Freelance Photographer / Ivan Pierre Aguirre Sanders/Wingo

7of10Immigrant kids walk through the C.B.P. facility where the newly formed "tent city" is located, Saturday, June 16, 2018, in Tornillo. Photo by Ivan Pierre Aguirre/ for the San Antonio Express-NewsPhoto: Ivan Pierre Aguirre/for the San Antonio Express-News, Freelance Photographer / Ivan Pierre Aguirre

8of10Joshua Rubin demonstrates in front of the detention center for juvenile migrants in Tornillo, Texas. MUST CREDIT: Photo courtesy of Joshua RubinPhoto: Courtesy

9of10FILE -- Demonstrators protest near the site of a tent city for migrant children near Tornillo, Texas, June 23, 2018. The federal government has been moving hundreds of children a week under cover of darkness to the tent city on the Mexican border in West Texas. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)Photo: VICTOR J. BLUE, NYT

10of10Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other demonstrators protest the immigration detention of children in Tornillo, Texas, June 23, 2018. Ocasio-Cortez, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th Congressional District on June 27, made abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement a central feature of her campaign. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)Photo: Victor J. Blue, NYT

Despite the recent easing of an arduous screening process for adults seeking to care for migrant children, federal authorities are preparing to continue detaining record numbers of youths in shelters — where their stays are growing longer.

President Donald Trump’s administration announced just before Christmas that it would require only the individual “sponsor” of a migrant child, rather than all adults in the sponsor’s household, to submit to fingerprint background checks. The number of minors in federal detention increased by 64 percent, to 14,600 in November, after the fingerprinting policy began in June.

The administration said the relaxation of the requirement would expedite the release of about 2,000 already vetted children from the controversial Tornillo tent camp near El Paso, now expected to close as soon as mid-January.

However, in apparent anticipation that the number of children in detention would remain at historic levels, the government is adding 1,000 beds at a shelter in Homestead, Fla., that already has a capacity of 1,350. The increase is needed due to the number of children crossing the border alone, Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber said in a statement, noting that the government had added 6,500 beds since October 2017.

Federal statistics show that the number of unaccompanied migrant children rose slightly to about 5,300 in November from 5,000 in October, but it has largely stayed in line with recent monthly totals.

More than 50,000 children came to the United States alone in the fiscal year ending in September. It’s far fewer than the 68,500 who crossed at the peak of the Central American child crisis in 2014 and overwhelmed the federal government.

Immigrant advocates said continued use of the fingerprinting requirement, even at a reduced level, discourages adults from coming forward to claim children because federal officials share their information with immigration agents. Forty percent of these sponsors are the child’s parent or legal guardian, and most are in this country illegally. Sponsors previously underwent record checks to determine their criminal background, but their information wasn’t shared for immigration enforcement.

The sudden need for fingerprinting services also has led to a processing backlog that advocates said left some children detained for a year.

“The fingerprint requirement is more than just misguided, more than just a bad idea,” said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, the legal director of the Virginia immigrant advocacy program at the Legal Aid Justice Center. “Its purpose is to carry out immigration enforcement against kids’ sponsors.”

Another person who works with migrant children, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, put it more bluntly.

“Sponsors are drying up faster than Lake Travis in July,” this person said. “It is not the number of children crossing the border, it is the length of stay, because the reunification has been hampered by (immigration) being involved in the process.”

Moreover, “the kids are beginning to show different sets of problems because they are staying longer,” he said.

Advocates say the new fingerprinting policies are largely to blame for an average length of stay in detention that tripled to 90 days in November.

Before the new policy took effect in June, fingerprints were not required for parents or guardians except when questions arose about the biological relationship or other special issues. Immigration information was not used to apprehend sponsors or other household members.

Border Patrol agents transfer migrant children to shelters run by Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement until they can be placed with screened sponsors, usually relatives, in a process that previously took about a month. The children stay there while pursuing their immigration cases in civil court.

Anxiety created by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown was exacerbated in 2017 when federal agents arrested more than 400 immigrants, including many parents and guardians who had sought to claim children in detention. The government used information from such children to target adults who officials accused of paying smugglers to bring minors. Most were deported but never charged with a crime.

The chilling effect was compounded this summer by the fingerprint requirement for all adults in a prospective sponsor’s household and an information-sharing agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At least 170 immigrant parents or guardians trying to claim children have been arrested since the policies were initiated. Nearly two-thirds had no criminal record.

The Trump administration has said it is trying to ensure children’s safety. During the 2014 surge of unaccompanied minors, President Barack Obama’s administration sought to place minors more quickly by briefly relaxing the requirements for relatives claiming children. Some ended up in harmful situations, including eight children forced to work under human traffickers on an egg farm in Ohio.

In addition, federal laws and “loopholes” giving more rights to migrant children facing deportation create a system “that rewards parents for sending their children across the border alone,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement this week.

Even when parents and relatives accept the risks and come forward, they can wait months before their children are released, according to two ongoing federal lawsuits.

Norma Duchitanga’s 17-year-old daughter arrived at the southern border in October, seeking to join her mother in suburban New York City, and was held in a federal shelter in Brownsville.

The teen said immigration agents told her that her mother would be deported if she was here illegally and that they would handle the case “very slowly” so that she was not released before she turned 18 in December. Once teens become legal adults, they can be deported far more quickly.

“It really scared her,” Duchitanga said in an affidavit as part of a class-action lawsuit filed in November by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The suit argues the fingerprint requirement violates laws mandating the prompt release of children from immigrant detention and spelling out how federal regulations may be changed.

Blanca Ortiz said she submitted her fingerprints and all the required paperwork in July, the same month her two children came to the United States. She moved out of her sister’s house and rented an apartment in Maryland. But five months later, her children had still not been released, according to the lawsuit.

The mother said she was distraught because her 11-year-old son told her that an older boy had touched him inappropriately at the foster home where he was being held.

“I am afraid for him,” Ortiz said in the affidavit. “I can’t sleep, I am so worried.”

According to the lawsuit, the government was unprepared to process all the fingerprints it suddenly began requiring this summer. Its primary contractor to provide the service, Lutheran Immigrant Refugee Service, runs a limited number of facilities across the country.

Weber, the Health and Human Services spokesman, said the department does not comment on pending litigation.

The release and reunification procedure has been purposefully slowed by the Trump administration, according to a lawsuit seeking class certification by the Legal Aid Justice Center, an advocacy group in Virginia. The process has “ground to a virtual halt, trapping these children in highly restrictive government-controlled facilities as if they were prisoners serving out criminal sentences without any semblance of due process,” the suit states.

One 13-year-old boy cited in the suit came to the United States in February after he said he faced death threats in Honduras. He was placed in a shelter in San Diego, but after confiding in a clinician that he wanted to leave, he was deemed an “escape risk” and transferred to a more secure facility in Washington.

The teen began suffering anxiety and insomnia and was prescribed medication. One night, he said, a staff member pushed him, causing him to tumble against an emergency exit door, which fell open. He hid in a trash can and was ultimately sent to an even more restrictive facility in Virginia.

Though his case worker recommended the boy’s release to his brother-in-law, other adults in the house feared submitting their fingerprints would lead to their deportation.

In July, after five months in detention, the boy was finally released to his family.

Another 15-year-old girl cited in the Virginia case came here from Honduras with her adult sister in April. The two were separated at the border, though the older sibling was released from immigration custody and was living with a friend in Maryland.

She was told she was not eligible to take in her sister, whom she has raised since she was 5, because her roommates did not want to share their fingerprints with immigration authorities. Eventually the sister moved into an apartment with relatives who agreed to submit their fingerprints.

Children whose relatives are afraid to retrieve them because of concerns over immigration enforcement, or whose parents are deported as a result, can end up in even more uncertain situations.

Jorge Linare worried about submitting his fingerprints in July 2017 to prove his biological relationship with his 7-year-old son. Though the government at the time did not require it of sponsors, a question arose about Linare’s biological relationship because the child’s birth certificate listed his grandparents as his adopted parents.

Shortly after his son was born, Linare left the boy with his parents in Guatemala and came to the United States. Linare said he had not known that the boy was coming here that summer.

The construction worker had been deported from the United States before, but the federal case worker told him the fingerprint screening had nothing to do with immigration.

Days later, Linare left the house he shared with his girlfriend in Aldine to pick up his son at a federal shelter in San Antonio. Immigration agents surrounded his truck and arrested him.

He was one of the 400 immigrants detained in the 2017 operation using children to obtain information about their parents. Linare was deported to Guatemala, where he said he faces death threats from a gang. He is living with a family friend in Mexico and trying to return to Houston.

His son has no other family in the United States and his grandparents in Guatemala don’t want him back, so the government released the boy to Linare’s girlfriend, Rosa Gomez.

“Pobrecito,” she said from her house in Aldine. “He has no other place to go.”

Gomez is now caring for the boy, who is named after Linare, along with her own three children and without the help of her boyfriend, who previously paid half of their bills. She has diabetes and her elderly mother lives with her as well.

Lomi Kriel is the immigration reporter at the Houston Chronicle, where she was the first to uncover the Trump administration’s separation of migrant families at the border in November 2017 -- six months before the policy was officially announced.

She has written on all aspects of immigration, including the tightening of asylum and mass arrests of immigrants under Trump. She has reported on the record backlogged immigration courts, impact of the 2014 influx of Central American children that overwhelmed President Obama's administration, attacks on refugees, and increased militarization of the border. She frequently reports from the border, and has also reported on immigration from El Salvador, Arizona and Washington D.C.

Previously she was a reporter for Reuters in Central America and covered criminal justice for the San Antonio Express-News.

She holds a master of arts in political journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor of arts in English from the University of Texas at Austin, where she wrote for her college newspaper.

Born and raised in South Africa, she immigrated to Houston in 1998 and speaks Spanish and Afrikaans.